Kinflix

“Kinflix forges a completely original conversation between film studies and adoption/ART studies. Fedosik persuasively demonstrates how the pull of biocentric definitions of personhood persists even in positive representations of alternative family formations.” —Margaret Homans, author of The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility

“With few other scholarly works considering adoption and ART in contemporary media culture, Kinflix—and its expertly rendered close readings—has broad multidisciplinary appeal, especially across adoption studies, women’s studies, film studies, and literature.” —Kim Park Nelson, author of Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism

In Kinflix, Marina Fedosik analyzes cinematic representations of adoption and technologically assisted reproduction to identify the intersecting paradigms through which Western cultures understand these ways of making families. Looking at diverse genres—films include The Omen, Raising Arizona, Losing Isaiah, Blade Runner, and more—Fedosik finds that the heterocoital family remains a hegemonic metaphor for representing and structuring all other methods of reproduction. This potentially precludes understanding adoption and ARTs on their own terms and requires those involved in nontraditional family formation to negotiate kinship connections and identities against the cultural demands of this model.

Resisting simple ideological readings of film genres, Fedosik unsettles cultural scripts around adoption and reproduction and scrutinizes moments where formulaic genre logic may be troubled by representations of lived experience that transcend common tropes of family formation. She argues that adoption as a reproductive technology is uniquely situated to expose cultural tensions around nontraditional methods of reproduction that are rapidly developing in the post-IVF biocultural landscape. Rapidly changing reproductive technologies, Fedosik asserts, demand a cultural response—and require more expansive reflection on reproductive futurities.

Marina Fedosik is Senior Lecturer at Princeton University. She studies cultural representations of adoption, kinship, and nontraditional reproduction.

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction Adoption and Other Forms of Post-Heterocoital Reproductions Chapter 1 Adoption and ARTs in (Melo)Drama: The Two Mothers Problem Chapter 2 Adoption and ARTs in Horror Film: The Hidden Spring of Heterocoital Origin Chapter 3 Adoption and ARTs in Comedy: Testing the Limits of the Heterocoital Order Chapter 4 Adoption and ARTs in Science Fiction: Reproductive Futurities Conclusion Acknowledgments Works Cited Index